


Breaking Point

by nigellecter



Category: Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drugs, M/M, Psychological Drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-06-08 09:01:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6848107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigellecter/pseuds/nigellecter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set about a year after Desperate Measures.<br/>Nigel and Will have been living together for about a year.<br/>a roleplay between ethicallyaskew and nigellecter.<br/>Will x Nigel. Errors are our own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was the sort of beautiful Romanian summer day that seems picked out of the post card.  All brilliant sunlight and smiling people, with just enough breeze to take the edge off the heat.

For Will, there was only the rattle of his keys in the lock, and the bitter cold that seemed to have leeched into the marrow of his bones.

“Come on.. come on..”  He muttered at his hands, cursing the clumsy fingers that couldn’t seem to twist the tiny, slippery bit of metal hard enough.  When he had arrived at the club, he had prayed that someone had stayed late.. But luck, it seemed, just wasn’t with him.

Finally the lock clicked over, and Will slid inside, blinking in the sudden darkness.  The club always seemed too quiet during the day, like all the life had been sucked out of it.  Glitter dusted the floor, and the tables were empty; a missed glass congealing at the end of the bar, and the flickering, neon lights plunged into darkness.

“Nigel..?”  He called into the quiet, hurrying towards his office; ignoring the sick, defeatist terror that he wouldn’t be there.  “Nigel?!”

___

Blissful caress of the luminescent rays didn’t reach down the depth of the concrete-surrounded bleakness of the walls. Completely filled with chipped paints and suffocating air of stale nicotine and corroding pungency of blood, intensified with his own. Even when the sun would have reached his overhead, his office maintained the pitch-black obscurity. 

Nights were precious. There was a sole reason why he had maintained his innate nocturnal nature down to his bones. It had a strong inclination to change its course at an instant and there was a certain enigmatic intuitiveness in those glimmering stardust. It made him to retract more to himself in the darkness as he plunged his head down to the netherworld, where the raw fear of  _ abandonment _ , along with his ignited raging fire inside turning against himself in  _ self _ - _ destruction _ . 

With the glittering shards of crystals strewn over the sinister puddles of crimson cohesively flowing down his side, the only illumination from the screen of his iPhone tells the truth of the story - the steel front door, along with the full-length mirror completely obliterated as his creaking bones and stretched skin ripples like a tumultuous ocean before the storm. 

The nose candy, along with a half-opened of whiskey clutched in a death grip along his other uninjured hand.  

Reverberating and passing through the obstinate lump in his throat, hoarse and scratched sound escapes through his slumped lips, matching his corporeality as well. 

“In here, loop through the back door, not the front.” His heightened sense doesn’t fail him in this moment as he hears Will’s footsteps, the other’s mood manifested into noncommittal glide and tactfulness.  

___

In the dark silence, the club seemed eerily abandoned; but in the space behind his eyelids, Will’s vivid imaginations could paint in all the details for the night before.  It had been teeming with life.  Businessmen with thick wads of cash, and hard hands, and ravers leaning against the bar, sounding their sticky coins.  The deafening music lowering a distant octave as he headed towards the back room, where he had been so frequently that it no longer seemed interesting.

Where Darko, with his twisted sense of not-humour, still had pictures of Nigel and his  _ beautiful _ ex wife on the wall.  But they were still images, and only had the power to cut little pieces off him once; and that wound had long-since cauterized.

“Nigel..?”

He called into the darkness again, his heart thudding nauseously against his guts as he picked his way through the debris of the night before.  “ _ Oh thank fucking God.”  _ He prayed heatedly under his breath, when he heard the voice, following the directions at more of a jog than a walk.  

Being terrified of what he would find didn’t slow his feet; and after a detour around the bar, and down the narrow cement hallway, his steps reverberating back at him, Will reached the office door.  

Broken mirror, and the half empty bottle of Țuică.. The white powder in the tiny case… And the fragment drops of red, turning black and rust brown as they dried, explained to the empath in vivid strokes of what he had missed.

Sitting on the edge of the desk, Will gently tilted Nigel’s face up to him, his own expression pulled with grieving strain.  He wanted to feel detached when he looked into his eyes, checking for any damage; but the colour of them (familiar in a way he hadn’t realized they had become) plundered his reserve.

“ _ Why?”   _ He finally asked, breathing the one word he needed.

___

The world halts as the faint cacophony of the percussion and heavy riffs of guitar, along with DJ’s spinning disks pivoting around the table becomes world’s away from his own paradigm shift. The etched recollections of the previous night’s fervor and upbeat streams of tunes still ingrained to each crease of his brain as he had concealed himself behind his own world’s away. Nothing a cloudy mystic whirl of obscurity and bombardment of blazing halos and radioactive stream of technicolor wouldn’t solve. 

Like the sudden deluge from the dam breaking, the view of the hydroelectric dam manifests itself in front of his desk, full of scattered paperwork, stacks of invoices and ledger filled with his usual cursive scrawls. Although only still images, those tore through him as if the echo of the gunshots would pour the gushing blood, dribbling down to mark a gestural line along the curve of his pressed fingertips. 

Each ripple serves as a chanting of the mob, he still cannot believe what he was hearing. No words needed to between their silent conversation, as the last kiss from his darling Gabi sears onto his tanned damp skin like a brand he cannot get rid of without leaving an ugly scar. 

Deeply rooted slash and the almost-fatal trajectory of the bullet still mars him, as they pass through his body with a laser-like precision. He watches his body collapse in a pendulous movement and he lets off a bubbling anger out in a form of a wounded lion’s purr. The slick blood, still warm from the incinerated pump of his thinning aorta materializes into a thin red velvety blanket. 

_ Drops turn dribbles, a shower becomes a drowning downpour.  _

Within each jagged brokenness of the shards, Hannibal’s words become course and gritty grains of sand, turning needles with rising decibel. The only displease annoyance is shown by a slightest frown, as eyebrows come together in a wide-angled V. 

There is a void, irreparable and dripping with venom, as hazel fuses with familiar crimson as eyelids flutter. He would’ve gauged them out if he didn’t have a single morsel of self-preserve and narcissism, albeit his own becomes that of the fallen angel’s. 

“You know exactly why, this fucking place exudes with  _ their  _ chronic presence. It never ceases and becomes brittle smirks and belittlement of my existence. As I have been forsaken before, I have yielded without moderation.” 


	2. Chapter 2

With Nigel in this state, locked so deeply in the winding curves and chasms of his own brain, what was Will supposed to do?  The air in the office smelled of liquor and blood; with the stale, cloying reek of cigarettes, already turning the air hazy and yellowing on the cement.  

“Come on.. We need to get you out of here..”

He was beyond himself, rattling the sort of almost-nonsense that only makes sense to people who are so lost and drowned in the bottle that they can’t find their way back to reality anymore.

If they way of living had anything to do with most peoples  _ reality _ .  

Will knew that, if Nigel dug in his heels, there was no force on Earth that could convince the stubborn man to walk.  So he took his injured hand, trying to assess the damage without causing him any more pain.  

The fact that he hadn’t overdosed.. That he was still  _ able  _ to speak, was a thin, cold comfort.  “Please, love.. You can’t just sit here, we have to go.”  Away from the drugs and the liquor courage; the old crutches he had been using to pull himself up.

___

Each particle of suspended dust seem to turn into a wiggling parasite, floating and swimming within his visibility as bulging hazel slowly shuts the world away. His heart drum, percussion gradually increasing until each jab perforates through every ribcage possible, the weightiness of his grim austerity pins his frame onto the chair like as if he had been petrified.

He had already taken a plunge, until the crystal clear night turned into a modulated, rippling atoms of his very own labyrinthine reverie - fluctuating between fire and water, noxious fume and scalding steam, amalgamating into one enormous whirling mass of black hole.

His chin dipped to plummet into the black opal-like glimmer of sparkling dusts as if he had been hurtled across the event horizon of the milky way galaxy, all the passing comets, asteroids and remnants of what used to be stars alighting the sky comes crashing down in a destructive mass as his body grounds itself back to reality.

“Have you ever come to face-to-face with the devil himself? The image of him being pitch-black and eyes of the void is fucking redundant. He walks among ourselves, as humanoid as he can get with none of those bloodthirsty glutton and sinister curl of lips plastered onto his megalomaniac mug.”

The flayed skin taut as it seems to chaff with his worthless effort to pull himself off from the fluttering heart beating like hummingbird’s wings flapping. “You exactly know fucking why,  _ you’ve _ faced him before.”  

Shattered remnants hang by a thread, spawning traces of preexisting strands of memories as he plucks the stake off from his heart, letting it become septic. 

It would be better to gauge them out in chunks than going after fragmented pieces coursing through the veins. Each jumpy ebb confirms its baneful existence. 

___

He would always be there under the surface, Will supposed.  Like all roads of elemental cruelty found their way home to his doorstep.  His presence in their lives had guided them to one another– a sick fascination with comparing the holes that had been carved in the other man’s soul.

But things had gotten better from there.. Or so Will had thought.  Maybe it was foolish wishing, that they could ever be truly away from it.  Just as his own whispering, callous inner voice still smacked of Hannibal’s smooth accent and cultured turn of phrase; Nigel’s blood still flowed with the same basic DNA.

Cells and plasma that still remembered when they had shared the same warm womb.

How could two broken people ever prop themselves up long enough to make a life of it?  Oh, but they had tried.  For a year they had fallen into bed together, and shared their meals.  They had laughed, and…  And they had loved.  Will had to believe that that was true.

“You know I have.  Just like I know you’re better than this.”

Pushing himself to his feet, Will reached across the desk, the weight of the whiskey bottle dragging slightly on the worn wood.  The click of the box of cocaine was loud in the office, the sound seeming to echo roughly in the small space.  

“Whatever we are when you sober up, Nigel– I’ll accept.  But I am not fucking going to let you sit in here,  _ pickling _ yourself.”  

Will’s voice snapped on the syllables; stretched over nerves that had been stretched too thin and taut.  Some might say that Nigel brought out the worst in him… But Will knew the truth.    He had given him half a heart; and exchange for half of Will’s.  Both battered and bloody and worthless to anyone else.

But they had done their best

“I’d rather see you fucking angry and spitting fire, than just slumped over your desk  _ giving up!” _

___

Equipped with better coping mechanisms and also exceptionally talented at not letting chip a sliver of strand out from his clutch, Hannibal had been a master craftsman. His grandeur projection of the world had been formulated without a single trace of visible paintbrush stroke. 

He would be a mere apprentice, with flaws and uneven layers of pigmented layers, clashing and dissociative. Letting his fiery spillage of emotion always get best of him. His own canvas made up of more unfinished, slapdash of choppy strokes along with exposed raw canvas. 

With a restorationist’s point of view, Hannibal’s version would be more praised over without no contention. How the impressionists’ paintings were condemned to be unfinished sketches, meeting harsh opposition. They eventually got the last laugh as they would leave a lasting impressions on the spectators’ mind; embodiment of an outwardly sunlight, brimming with warmth and vigor of unrefined, yet beastly dance of flamboyancy. 

Now the vivid colors were draining, with each twist of adulteration and manipulation. His masterpieces looked dismal in black and white. No chiaroscuro, meticulous blending, composed of painstakingly time-consuming glazes. 

With the venomous drug coursing through his system, the strings attached upon the deepest reserve strengthened to take hold of the detached reality. It wasn’t the confrontation itself he had feared - it was the aftermath, the wreckage that would leave him to metamorphose into a completely different creature that he would dare not face sober.

“Does it matter? Unless I drain the whole fucking five liters of blood and scoop out all the sinews and veins and all that, all the complicated reverence and scornful bitterness, the undefinable strings become sticky and lingering like a burnt caramel between your teeth.” 

_ More like a shriveled lumps of charred bacon.  _

“I have coped with unpleasantries of every strand weaved into the recollections but all the suspended dusts - nonadmitted flaws and all the garbage - illuminates down to every hidden corner of your soul.”

Fidgeting with his fingers as the vanishing warmth of the blood turns a source of destruction, rather than the being an elixir through transfusion, the strumming of his curled fist upon the grains of the desk reaches vehemently against his eardrums. Like a snooze of a wake-up call. 

“And this fucking dragon needs a refractory period to spawn the goddamn energy to spew fire and ravage through whatever disposition I come across with between the creases of shrewdness.”  


	3. Chapter 3

People treated Nigel like he was dangerous;  _ handle with care _ ; and always afraid that his mercurial mood would shift suddenly, and they would find themselves drowning in a world of trouble.  Respect that had transformed itself into fear, watching Nigel too closely, like one would be aware of a big cat in the room.

Will didn’t tiptoe around him.

They had never seen Nigel at 3am, trying to scramble eggs over their failing oven, cursing life and God and the nature of bloody uncooperative eggs.  Palinka and cooking had never been a good mix in their house.  

They  _ assumed _ he would love you, and leave you, just for his own amusement.  But Will had felt his fingers daring through his curls lazily, the sheets tangled around their legs.  As far from running as could be.

He was a man with excellent taste in soup, and who made terrible choices in shirts.  

“Fine, then you can have your refractory period, but  _ not _ here.”  Will replied flatly, tucking the small case of white powder in his back jeans pocket; the half empty bottle of spirits plants on the floor by the office door, to be returned to the bar later.  “You scared the fuck out of me, Nigel.  But obviously if you’re still coherent enough to be a sarcastic bastard, then you must be better off than I thought.”

They both looked awful.  Pale and drawn and stretched too thin.  Will’s blue eyes traced Nigel’s fingers as he fidgeted– finally reaching over and taking his hand in his own.

Will’s skin was cold, almost clammy.  He was always cold if he hadn’t slept.

“The cleaners are going to be here soon, to make sure the club is passable for tonight.  And I don’t think they want to deal with your shit coping methods.”

___

Feeling like conking out, he feels lesser than the abandoned coffee grounds, subsiding through and over and over. He had built his own damned tower of Babel multiple times and sought conquering the despicably obstinate thoughts, that tangible benefits and precautions of contradicting emotions, too rampant like hoof-prints of a wildebeest in a thundering stampede. 

The human mind was a resilient and inexorable thing. It just didn’t know the concept of ‘giving the fuck up.’ Never one to let something slide as it didn’t matter. And he could still see the multitude of his carbon copies, congruently (and treacherously) staring in mockery.  

Both beneficial and hazardous to his health, a bit of distress fueled his rambunctious energy, but most often, he felt like an army ant underneath the magnifying glass, rapidly roasting himself to be disintegrated. 

He would rather eat those unfortunate egg shells lodged into the yolk like it does on the ridges of bones and stretched skin than putting another morsel of whatever Hannibal had made for him all those years. Although addictive and tolerable (more so than he cares to admit), he’d face up to the battles with aggravating eggs. 

“It is by far my fucking intention to give the clean-up lady a bloody heart attack with all of these wreckage,” he retorts, putting another round of bullet in his vessel of sarcasm. “You must think of me so fucking lowly, I’m not a fucking piece of little dainty fucking teacup Hannibal constantly yaps about. I’ll rather be a unbreakable and crude mug that holds triple the fucking amount of bitter coffee than be expensive as fuck, a lost identity of metaphorical bamboozle.”

Retracting his fingers as he jumps a few inches at the clammy coldness, his brows come together in a forlorn manner. “Get those fucking cold fingers away, a fucking unsolvable conundrum, why are Will Graham’s fingers icy pricks?” 

Lifting his ravaged hand as if he would a stained piece of rag, he grumbles a few profanities before coming to his senses a bit, which had been absent throughout the whole night. Having a history of going through his salty coarse period, coarser and even more unsavory than stale moldy rock-hard loaf of ciabatta, keeping a well-stocked kit had been utmost necessity. 

“Help me fix this fucking shit of a rag limb.” 

___

“I never said you were dainty, or fragile, Nigel.  But you’ve also got enough of this shit in your blood to kill a horse.”  Will resisted the urge to roll his eyes, a hissed sigh of frustration sliding through his front teeth.  

The office was a mess, and Nigel was coming apart at the seams.   _ Wonderful. _

With more gentle care than he felt Nigel strictly deserved, Will tightened his fingers around Nigel’s injured hand, refusing to let him pull away.  It was a patchwork of tiny cuts, and a few deeper ones; blood starting to dry and crack across his knuckles, rust brown and smelling like copper pennies.

He ignored the comment about his hands; yes, they were cold.  No, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.  So Nigel was just going to have to suffer through it.  

“It doesn’t look broken, just cut up.”  He said after a moment, slowly rolling Nigel’s fingers across his own; Will looked little better than the other man, as he squinted slightly at the damage.   _ Serves you right, smashing up your office like that. _

“It’ll serve you right if you get gangrene from some ancient, never-been-changed bandages.”  He added tensely, fishing for the first aid kit in the desk drawer.  At that moment, it felt like the anger was the only thing keeping him afloat.  It was cathartic, like a burning wall between himself, and the other twisted, toxic emotions squatting behind his ribs.

“I have no idea why you thought  _ this _ was a good idea.”  He said dryly, sitting on the edge of the desk.  Setting Nigel’s injured hand on his own knee, Will flipped open the first air kit, giving the little bottle of peroxide a shake, “This probably isn’t going to feel very nice.”

___

Contacting as his deflated lungs to let out all the excess of noxious gas built due to the venom inside his bloodstream to be filtered out, he shoots an equally intense arrow tips of a gaze downward. Registering a mesh of shallow cuts, some deep ones along with embedded shards of glimmering crystal and dust coarsely grazing his hardened flesh like shrapnel of the a hand grenade. 

“Or cause a damn fucking civil war upon my sanctuary.” Like the central computing system, his brain whirls faster than ever, aided by lingering flare of the drug temporarily boosting all of his senses. It doesn’t take a lone wolf’s howl to let a flash of scornful smile cross his expression. However infinitesimal or swift, Will would definitely take notice. The other had a particular penchant to see the whole picture - he could minutely detect the sighing movement between each leaf, he would be contumelious or condescending enough to disregard seeing the grandeur of a problem.   

Those meshes of cuts cut deeper than knives and just like moth to a flame, he would only see red and reduced down to charred ash without the weight on the balance. Kisses over widening stitches. 

Until the whole world bursts in his rapid incineration or he would die fucking trying to get as many along to accompany him to the gates of limbo. 

_ No, before he acts upon the grandiose plan to set the world on fire and bringing more people down under his feet, he needs to get his damn fucking mind straight and get over this nugatory fit.  _

“Don’t put a fucking curse on me like a goddamn voodoo doll. How fucking ironic that would be, surviving infallible fatal wound to the skull but a fucking gangrene? You know who died because of that? That whiskey mogul, dear old friend Jack Daniel.” 

Raising an indignant eyebrow, he huffs before his involuntary instinct tries to withdraw from the unpleasant needles and pins worse than a tattoo machine gun’s continuous perforation. “Just save the goddamn preparatory talk and get it over with.”  


	4. Chapter 4

After a year together, they had both ended things.  In a hail of angry digital words; tiny pixels that, when combined, had the power to rake through even their own formidable defenses.   _ The pen in mighter _ , indeed.  They had fought before, but not quite like this.  Will had never had the first ticket out of Romania burning a hole in his back pocket.

He should be packing his things.

And yet, he found himself here.  Nigel’s bloody hand resting on his knee, settled there with the sort of comfortable familiarity that it had no right to have.  Fishing the tweezers from the first aid kit, Will gave them a cursory squeeze, testing the tension in them.  Not that it would make much difference, he needed to get the tiny fragments of mirror out, and the were the best tool for the job.

Will wasn’t sure which one of them had forgotten that he didn’t  _ have _ to help.  There was no obligation for him to save Nigel from his damn, cocaine fueled spiral into self destruction.  

The fact that he was there made it a moot point.  He could leave, but they both knew he wasn’t going to.

“Shut up, Nigel.”  He muttered, pushing his glasses more securely up the bridge of his nose, an exhausted weight dragging on every syllable.  He was so tired, mentally, emotionally, physically; using up the last of his fuel and running on fumes.  

“You’re not going to die of gangrene.  They’d amputate your arm before that happened.  So if you died, it’d be your own damn fault.”

Click…click…click…  One by one, Will gently prised the minute fragments of glittering mirror from Nigel’s hand; smoothing the pad of his thumb over every tiny, bleeding scratch to make sure there were no more shards hidden underneath.  A small, scattered collection of them being dropped, one after another, into the grimy ashtray on the edge of the desk.

“I don’t even know why I’m bothering.  You’re a grown man.  But no, of _ course _ you had to put your hand through a mirror.  And that you’d make dogs meat out of your hand if you tried to fix it yourself.”

Will sat on the edge of the desk, one foot tucked into the side of Nigel’s chair, pressed in tight against his thigh, to keep his own knee steady while he worked.  Bitter, sardonic words marking the snip-click sound of the tweezers.  

“As if I needed to put curses on you.  You managed it well enough without my help.”

___

Even a wildfire would lose its all-consuming power and its capricious unpredictability and he would wander around like a hopeless, hesitant lost child about to collapse in a heavy snowdrift with hypothermia, with all of his warmth dwindled and expelled. Perhaps his mentality, shoddily soldered with hands of a layman, with its essence had already been taking an out of body experience as not all of the strands would make it back.  _ A wanderlust spirit _ , without a set stone destination. 

The vacancy of his expressionistic hazel, the swirl of vivid colors that told even more accounts and recollections than the mere black and white text itself. Of course, there had been detachment within the stark contrast of calm screen and his fingers, capable to engage in silent conversation of linking chains of salty retorts and barks. An agglomeration of piled up impastos, each layer manifested into puddle, stream and eventual vicious surge that would break the weir open. 

The inquisitive digits curl around Will’s leg without being too inappropriately squeezing, not with lacking strength to plaster itself upon the clinging fabric, of his own, on the other. The associations becoming like Hannibal to modernism, shorts, ‘real’ casual outfits and fast food, to his dictionary containing words like ‘ _ apologize _ ,’ ‘ _ please _ ,’ and ‘ _ pathetic _ .’ 

In lamentation of the extreme gaucherie on his part, the uncharacteristic awkwardness smearing across his facade along with a slow ebb of his heart shuts him right off. Along with the less flaring receptors of his brain slowly shutting off as if it had been whirling in prepare for a shutdown. 

He could still reminiscence the screen fogging up with both his exasperation and re-rekindling anger, going through the period of aberrant ablation of solid-frozen glacier and the cascading waterfall of the smoke, visible in arctic chill. 

“I’d rather fucking die than have that atrocity happen. Have you ever seen an one-armed gun-toting fucking dashing criminal? Prosthetic isn’t fucking cool.” 

All the occurrences out of all the deviating behavior he had exhibited, this one ranks the all-time high as the incorrigibly most bizarre account of soothing sensation he had experienced in his life. “And it  _ had  _ to be my fucking dominant hand. More effective, it was either going all the way or not starting at all.” 

Perhaps he would snort diamond dusts and die of internal bleeding for that manner. The silvers of infinitesimal shards concocts a rather gruesome image of Colombian drug lord’s foreseen demise, which both sounds like a faraway fairy-tale as his own sealed exit. With that amount of pain imprinted onto his slightly elevated heartbeat, these recurring teeny tiny tingling sensations don’t even crease a inch of fold onto his skin. 

“Perhaps a double negative will become a fucking positive. Who knows, a fucking bomb goes off and I might live.”  

___

Will’s hand jerked to a stop over Nigel’s, the gleaming points of the tweezers hovering like a silent threat in midair.  With the sort of elaborated, stiff slowness, he set them down on the desk, the cheap metal making barely a sound on the scarred wood.

“You’re not as fucking  _ dashing _ as you think you are.”  He ground out, pushing himself off the desk, his tightly-gripped composure unraveling far too fast, the threads of his fraying control sliding hard through his grasping fingers.  “And it goddamn well serves you right!  I should leave you there with all those pieces of glass stuck in your hand.  See if that reminded you not to act like such a fucking idiot!”

The night they had met, Nigel had drawn a gun on him. 

Will had never considered that it might be empty.

And he’d still walked away with him.

A year later, and he was standing in a trashed office in the basement of a Romanian club.  The sort of place that existed just to launder money through.  With a ticket out of the country in his pocket, and Nigel’s blood on his fingers.

“You told me– fucking  _ texted me _ – that I was looking for a free pass with you.  Damn you for that, Nigel!  How many times have I sat up, waiting for you to show up?  How many  _ goddamn times _ have I cleaned up your blood, and patch up your wounds so you didn’t have to go to the hospital?   _ How many?” _

Will’s voice cracked as he turned away from the desk, watching Nigel’s warped reflection in the remains of the shattered mirror, the long shards still trapped in the frame.  Shaking hands clenched and released, searching for something to hold onto.

He hadn’t cried, not really, since Abigail died.  But the tears burned at the corners of his eyes, unfamiliar and bitter-hot; and he ground them back with the heels of his hands.

“I’m leaving Bucharest.  Flight leaves tonight.”  

___ 

Along the moral gangrene and the gashes themselves becoming strands of necrosis, he could already vividly feel the presence of the phantom arm. It immediately shatters the concentration among the grim reality, where his confiscated final state of the butterfly suffers from the vanished freedom. More than the scar tissues he had earned from breaking out the chrysalis, the drenched wings become brittle and flakes apart at the seams, just like the strewn shards and shattered reflections of himself. 

“And you fucking accused me otherwise with the photo you came across, the truth is, no matter how lowly I think about the existence of the said evidence, not everyone gets a fucking happy ending.”  _ That they deserved. _ He doesn’t have to hem and haw to come to a realization of their nontemporizing outcome of their relationship. He had registered it long time ago when they had hurled fury-charged exchanges of nonacceptance and disregardful remarks. With him building the digital fortress, as he had considered it preposterous and quixotic. 

“Then fucking leave, I thought your mind were already fucking set in stone when you told me what a fucking pretty hole I’ve dug myself into. I just never thought our ending would come so soon - all the fucking prose and unhinged closures and all, but the denouement strikes sooner than the comets grazing the sky.” 

Taking a bottle of peroxide and pouring right onto the dog-chewed skin resembling upturned earth full of overgrown weeds, the tendons stretches out along the line of his neck as his jaw sets. His movement is precise yet the fluidity breaks in between with a gradual tremor, as if shaken with the aftershock of the earthquake. He has so little faith in the ebb and flow of his own heartbeat, as he begins to build walls faster than the feelings could ever make an escape - the brewing emotion would compensate for the terror of its ebb. 

_ Oh, how he had leaped with the flow of the rising tide, brimming over with the fleeting permanency of felicity.    _

“Countless, nine fucking times, though some of those weren’t my fucking wrongdoing.” His gaze still equivocating as the unraveled bandage soaks through the drenched excoriation of his ensanguined flesh, the recurrence of sanguinary drowns him even more within the extreme moments of darkness. The continuous pain changed him; growing more brooding as the frame of his mind locks and solidifies itself. 

“I’m not going to jostle you for that fucking case of drug, give it back.” With a forceful tug of the bandages, he watches more crimson pedals bloom along the stub and crosses his ankles over the edge of his desk. “Exit that very fucking door, you’re even worse than a passerby. Whenever the next time we will ever cross our fucking path, you can fucking bet the gun will be fully loaded.” 


	5. Chapter 5

“It wasn’t a photo, Nigel.  I saw her.  Stefania, you said..  All the other girls here, they.. “  Will swallowed hard, watching Nigel’s slanted reflection behind him.  The clumsy way he wound the bandages around his bleeding hand, and the seeping, peroxide- infused red that leeched through.   _ Stubborn ass. _

He wanted to be angry, to cling to that thread of galvanizing emotion; so hot and red that he could build himself a wall out of it.  Something to keep everyone out.  Will had become a master carpenter of walls; but Nigel had been under his skin so long, he knew were all the doors were, and where most of the keys were hidden.

“They knew I was with you.  But she didn’t.  And you didn’t stop her, or correct her, or.. Anything.  You just encouraged her, and maybe,  _ christ _ , I should have known you would eventually!’

“..But I didn’t.  Never crossed my mind.”

Try as he might, the anger seemed to bleed away.  Nigel’s words cutting mortal wounds, and his resolve flooding away in a tidal wave of scalded feelings.  For the second time, Will ground the heels of his hands against his eyes, the world blurring as he dashed away the moisture he couldn’t afford.

“I thought one of us would get killed.  Knowing our luck.  We’re both shit at staying safe, and it seemed obvious that one of us would eventually get shot.I just never thought I’d get traded over for a half naked blonde, covered in glitter.  But, of course, right?”

Will’s strained, gallows laugh was more of a hiccup, his throat working as he gulped an unsteady breath.  “Why wouldn’t you?  A pretty young thing, making it perfectly clear that she’s more than willing.  A whole  _ fucking world apart _ from the guy you woke up beside that morning.”

“You’re not going to shoot me for leaving… That would imply that you had wanted me to stay.”  With a hopeless, thin-lipped smile, Will rolled his shoulders in a parody of a shrug, “I’m replaceable, Nigel.  Half of Bucharest would be happy to take my place.”

Slowly he pressed a hand over his stomach, a dark and self destructive thought flickering through his exhausted brain.  He had stayed in Romania because Nigel had been more important than finding Hannibal.. Will had  _ let _ him be more important.

“Take care of yourself..”  He added, turning towards the door.

__

The embedded invisible dusts turn thorns as each fiber permeates through with more blood and brewing venom; the sealant gapes along with each expansion, his eardrums ringing with frantic beating of the bongo drum. His own body, running all-time high on cortisol pushes hard against the back of his already dilated and ingrained hazel, growing distended with undulating warmth. 

In contrast to dribbling blood that continue to draw incinerating lines across the pores and risen canyons between the protruding veins, he feels the revolver, ever becoming one with his too heated body as he would be out like a light in a kiln, charred with his own imploding steam that fortifies the crumbled walls. If the embedded remnants of shards could turn into scalding shrapnel, digging further into the sinews and cartridges, immobilizing him against the very chair he grounds himself in, as if fossilized. 

“Encouragement doesn’t equal the extended arousal, the elevation of one’s heartbeat. I assure you, my heart was at a fucking stead-beat. As calm as the unperturbed ocean, still as a fucking snapshot of the Polaroid.” He accesses, still thinking about the still image, not the face-to-face encounter itself. He could rule it out easily, because he hadn’t simply been present. 

“I fucking hope you don’t have to shake the film to see the manifestation, for it to tell the fucking truth. Yeah, she’s fucking pretty, not even popped her cherry. She’s too naive and callow for someone like me to take under my wings, but it just.. happened.” The sparkling glitter which could resemble the celestial bodies scattered through the continuity of the vast sky, stretching without limitation. When the impermanence had been contained along with the putrefying scent of his rotting emotions; full of cruelty, shark’s bared gleam, stretching rows, replaced easily if one ever knocks off. 

Broken pieces made more rattles, however empty and unfathomably scathing they may be. Finding himself sinking further through the very vessel he situates himself upon, the firm earth ripples with the cap toe of his oxfords click against the back of the desk leg. 

“I’m already fully marinated upon the self-medicated discovery - out of all the fucking people, you ought to know better. Glitter and blonde only translates to comets and shooting stars... A transient ‘beauty’ as you mention.”    

As if sickeningly sticky with tar, setting in inspissate gloom as the coagulating blood emits the sharp bitterness and pungency upon his charred emotions, he gives a cynical smile. “To what end, Will? To stab my fucking back? No, even without sabotaging and adulterating my fucking drink or food, I’m already willing to let myself fucking tear apart with dismantled memory - like a disintegration of apparatus. Wind me up, watch me fucking pull apart at the seams. I don’t need fucking strippers and endless champagne to do that.” 

His dilated pupils turning a notch darker, as if seeping in all the traces of ominous darkness like the black hole. There’s broken beauty in letting himself cross that irreversible path and suffocate himself in the remnant of his existing self and before he does that, watching it morph into a corroding bundle of discharging energy. There’s enrapturing gravitation that continues to pin him down like a helpless prey about to be wrapped into a bundle of spun entanglement.  

“Your implication would be a correct one and I’d give yourself more credit than terming yourself with such inferior definition.” Making a beeline for the door and shielding themselves from letting the flickering light of the corridor illuminate the settled darkness, as if he didn’t want to perturb the looming darkness about to unleashed further. Their shared exhaustion, the baneful existence merging into one. “All I fucking know is if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be standing here, dripping pestilence and suffocating within the very place that once shone with strands of light.”

___

Every bar the world over had sticky floors.  And even Darko’s money-laundering skin club on a Bucharesti side street, was no different.  Will could feel it tugging at his shoes as he walked; tacky and grimy, like someone had covered it with super glue, and eventually it had become saturated with dirt and grit.

He was so tired at that moment, that he didn’t even care.  All he wanted was to sink down in a corner, his knees pulled up to his chest.  Folding himself in as small as he could, so he could gather up the broken fragments that Nigel’s words had shattered off him.

“If I give myself too much credit, I might actually think that…  Well, I guess that isn’t important.”  Will’s laugh was a brittle thing, and ugly.  With the gallows amusement he had learned at Hannibal’s hand; where laughter is the last insubstantial barrier you could throw against the world.

Better, he thought, than crying.

“Right, sure Nigel.  If it wasn’t for me.  At this point, maybe it doesn’t matter if you blame me.  Whatever makes you happy.”  He sighed exhaustedly, one hand resting on the door frame.  Here there were no shattered shards of mirror to see Nigel’s reflection, just the roughness of his words.  Almost tangible against the back of his neck, and with his free hand, Will tried to rub them away.

“I should go back.. You know where to find me for the next few hours, at least.”

__

All the whirling dervish had discarded all the necrotising infections that gnaw his skin to turn septic, yet he simply had no energy to pick up all the fragments with salvageable scraps attached. All the percolated gritty remnants he would filter through yet again and again. Despite his own self-egotistic ways of carrying himself, he didn’t even have a single vehement pillar that stood without widening cracks that threatened to have everything collapsed. 

That certainty and acceptance bought him home. Another place to pour over his whirling emotions; even when depth of the ocean stirred and none of the surface had been disturbed, his somatic response would prove otherwise. Even deceiving him. Will would read him like an open book, even through the chapters he hadn’t formulated the words for.   

His eyeballs feel like the hurtling fireballs in the air, with fully manifested flames charring and cracking the back of his eyes until they threatened to bulge and pop. Only barely perceiving the pink stub reeking with half-attempted handshake with death and a complete breakdown of his shattered conscience floating like the stale smoke and a layer of dust suspended in air, he sinks back to the grim reality. 

The weight of acute stinging slashes upon his abused hand along with seeping discharge through the pores is the only reminder of his existence upon the world.  

However self-deprecating and annihilative this is by stripping off his sanity and making a zealous attempt to persevere Will and his strange bond, he wouldn’t choose any other city to do so than the city struggling to identify itself as a cultural, municipal center filled with both washed down traditions and eclecticism of decay and reconstruction. 

“Where there would be more pieces of scattered fragments imperceptible to the naked eye. Come, I should join you in collapsing upon those. At least you won’t be isolated in our flat.” 

His gaze falls upon Will’s hand where his own blood begin to chip off in flakes as his own slithery excoriating hand mimics the same by labor of stripping off another vile recompense of falsified identity. Then he turns to escape to the jagged corners of his sanctuary as his grasp tightens as he entwines his fingers with Will’s.     


	6. Chapter 6

Over the last year, Will had put up with a lot of shit for Nigel.  He had given up his career (alright, that was questionable.  The remains of his credibility had bled out on Hannibal Lecter’s kitchen floor) and had stepped away from his life.  Moved halfway across the world, to a country where absolutely  _ nothing  _ made sense.  

And he had done it all happily.  A bleeding heart romantic on a fool’s errand, apparently.

And Will knew that there was a lot he would do to get Nigel out of that office.  To make sure that he wouldn’t be overdosed, or out of his head, when Darko showed up for the evening. Because that man was a snake.. And for all his anger, Will didn’t intend for Nigel to be transformed into a statistic.

But at that moment, letting his lover touch him, was more than he could stand.

For the first time, Will snatched his hand back from Nigel, as if the touch of his rough, familiar skin had scalded.  His breath jerked raggedly in his lungs, as Will jabbed his hands into his pockets; a furious flush creeping up the sides of his neck.  

“I think I’d prefer the fucking isolation, if those are my options.  I’m not  _ collapsing  _ on anything.  I’m sweeping up the pieces of my life, and trying to see if there is anything useful that I can make out of them.”

Will’s feet kept carrying him forward, and he wasn’t sure if the long strides were trying to take him towards the doors, or away from Nigel.  He didn’t want to place bets on either.  The twisted emotions in his guts churning like hot vinegar, the caustic fumes rising in the back of his throat.

“You might have been angry, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you for the things you said.  So just keep your goddamn hands to yourself, alright?”

He added, fishing the keys from his pocket as they stepped out into the sunlight.  It was blinding after being inside, the brilliant light making his eyes water as he blinked sharply.  

“Just get into the car.. The best thing for you is to just sleep this off at home.” 

___

As his habitat and surroundings oozed with the sense of confusion and none of the comforting correspondence, his own personality remained to be pendulous. A gift wrapped with a bundle of unpredictability and capricious volatility. The brewing maelstrom always present within his fragile heart. All the emotional weakness had been armored up with animosity and insolence, but Will was already past that. Perhaps as good an antidote than anyone else can offer, before the spreading venom either burst open an artery or even worse, drowning in his own fucking blood with bubbling bile in his throat.

Never the happy kid, except when he had relinquished himself to the ephemeral euphoria of copulatory pleasures, surrounded by debauchees. Playing the field, as having been blatantly labeled as a player, when he finally realized he had found the love of his fucking life when his life had been down in the dumps, hitting the nadir with the incapacitating evisceration rendering him immobile. Feeling worthless than ever as he thought about letting everything go, it would be months before he would be able to light a cigarette to feel the familiar rush of nicotine and letting himself out in a loose with another bout of speedballing high would cement the feeling of self-satisfied beatitude. 

Until he had crossed the path with Will Graham. Judging by the nature of his confidants, the night’s unfurling would be likely retrace the same sketch line over and over again. 

His innocence and guilelessness taken away too rapidly like a whip of the belt. Dealing with sum of money, greater than a metropolitan city’s yearly budget had meant that he had cash to burn and he wouldn’t even bat an eye when signing the contract that would seal their inescapable fate. After ‘the notorious drug lord of Bucharest’ faded out from the map, taking an unexpected and abrupt leave of absence as his whereabouts became the talk of the town, some rivals presumed him dead and out of the picture, while other zealous subordinates occasionally had visited him. Taking turns in supplying appurtenances; mostly morphine and pure coke, intravenously used in each arm. The numbing effect combined with their off-setting side effects, his body had built so much dependency and resistance as many nights at the hospital had him hooked on IV fluids and vile procedure to clear out his system.

Maybe this required that sort of  _ fucking isolation _ he had gone through - a half an year of it. 

A tight pinch of forehead, travels southward to easily reach sealed straight-lined lips as an idle brush fuels his undignified retreat. Having been blindfolded with furious anger, the jabbing sunlight makes him to quirk his hips, pivoting away from the incinerating heat. The distorted reflection of himself repels him back towards his bike - where there would be no  _ dead ringer _ . 

“I’m taking my damned bike.” His  _ damned defiance  _ would be the one that does its job in finality. 

___

It was like dealing with a child.  If children were over 6 feet tall, angry, and had a mouth like a sailor.  Will took a deep breath, just trying to push aside the suffocating tension that wound around his lungs; like shackles he could break, if he could just inflate himself a little bit more.  

Or maybe, if he were stronger.

But the tangled, toxic emotions that had propelled him out of the club the night before had long since abandoned him.  Will felt wrung out and exhausted; he had tried to talk to Nigel.  Hadn’t worked.  Tried to reason with him.  Nothing.  Whatever view the other man had taken of the world, it was spun through a lens of drugs and liquor, and had no resemblance to reality.

“I don’t want you to drive, Nigel..”  He said quietly, one hand resting on the car door, “But we both know that I can’t actually force you into the car.  So just.. drive safe.  Get home in one piece.  I’ll meet you there.”

It would turn out to be an ironic statement.

Leaving Nigel to sort out his bike, and get his keys, Will pulled out into the late afternoon traffic.

The apartment was rumpled, as it always was.  But the sheets on their bed still looked the same as they had the morning before– save for the top blanket that had been relocated to a tangled lump on the couch. 

Obviously where Will had tried to sleep, when the long night (and the suddenly too-large bed) had seemed too hard to bear.  But, like their parking space outside, the apartment was empty.

The answering machine light was flashing– the land line functioning as a glorified messaging service for people they didn’t want to give their cell numbers too.

_ “…Hello, Mr. Lecter.. My name is Elena Petrescu, a nurse at Floreasca Hospital.  If you could please call me, or come down to the hospital as soon as you’re able…. _

___

Still entrapped in the vicious circle of remorse and resentment towards his twin, the concurrence of emotions that had warped his subconscious now turns into a downpour of torpidity. It swallows him whole like a quick-sinking sand, decomposing and disintegrating him into atoms. With his cold nonchalance contained in those contrasting hazel oozing menace and intensity, the ignition of the engine between his thighs resurrect the animosity.

Lashing out against Will was ineffective and far from being bountiful. Like the opposite magnetic fields, the false projection of Hannibal stays even when he’s mounted on the bike, shooting out like a columnized air pushing out a bullet. A hint of boiled anger, brimming off as he senses the other’s conspicuous gaze. Very akin to how his own transfixed ones would smolder with burning embers. Manifesting like the spewing fire from the flamethrower afterwards.

None of the pleasurable sensations - the grazing strands of wind, the flapping of the leather, surging to become one with the surroundings as the smoothly contoured body shoots out almost effortlessly with his usual dexterity, soon turning into a blunder as his butterfingered hand fails to hold and teeter violently.  

With the taut string of willpower pulling him in front of the residential building, which looks more dim and bleak with the fortified bricks and cements that seem to shut all the luminescence of the crystal clear, all in all pleasant afternoon, the distant chirping of migratory birds isn’t enough of an ablation to subdue his pandemonium full of unconfident skepticism. As uncharacteristic it is, the skewed reality that he faces through the sieve, all the pleasantness and conviviality percolated through the pendulous altering perception of suppressant and stimulant.

Dragging himself up through fifth floor walk-up with indignant and unglorified drag of his limbs, he realizes he hadn’t retrieved the bundle of keys, still jabbed against the ignition as his fired up Ducati still hums like a resting beast taking a leisurely respite. With an earth-rattling exhale, and the grueling flight of the stairs burdensome as the Atlas condemned to hold the sky for eternity with endurance, he moves in autopilot and immediately gravitates towards the couch. 

The absence of him the night before lingers in the form of scrunched blanket, which seem to still retain the apparition of Will’s frame as his weight dissipates the well-preserved mold. With a rub and rake of his face to rouse himself up to pull enough of attention, he filters through the answering machine before the message from the hospital serves as a jabbing wake-up call. 

Bulging eyes laced with frenetic red veins on the verge of rupturing whole, the parched mouth fails to utter out a coherent string of profanities as he storms out the door. Along with the hastened steps, his heart threatens to push through the skull as shallow breaths proportionally egg on his gradually fleeting consciousness.  


	7. Chapter 7

The Floreasca Hospital was a massive building, and of the largest hospitals in the city.  It was a grand, curving structure, set back slightly from the street, and always seemed to have  _ something  _ happening, no matter what time of day it was.  It was a place of sirens and bustling nurses, of dark expressioned doctors holding ominous clipboards, and well-meaning visitors carrying flowers in enforced, vibrant colours.

Signs hanging from the ceiling guided newcomers through the wards:  Emergency.  Pediatrics.  Maternity.  Oncology.  And a woman at a font desk looking very tired indeed, and she tried to direct both patients and family alike, to their destinations.

It was, all things considered, not difficult to find Nurse Petrescu.  She was an officious lady, with severely starched seams in her uniform, and an equally lacquered hairstyle.  Not a strand out of place, or stray stain on her shirt, despite the work she must have been doing earlier in the shift.

Among her colleagues she was known as  _ the Hatchet _ , and she never forgot a face.

She was sitting behind the desk when Nigel arrived, patiently sifting through a seemingly endless pile of paperwork.  Patient notes and chart details, dosage lists for every patient, and the weekly inventory for the pharmaceutical cabinet, all neatly arranged in front of her, in very neat piles.

Her expression when Nigel walked in, was less than thrilled.  “Mr. Lecter..”  She hummed resignedly, standing up politely, “Thank you for coming so quickly.  A patient was brought in a little over an hour ago, a Mr. Graham.  And he had you listed as his primary contact.  I don’t believe he’s awake yet, so I’ll just get you to sign these forms…”

___

The nurse’s voice sounded strikingly familiar, yet the name didn’t match anyone he had acquainted with. No wonder. His used-to-be significant other until he had plunged himself with endless hours of work, their gravitational force soon became the same side of the magnetic field not too long after. Elena had changed drastically since then - none of her glittery racy past present in her strikingly pragmatic look, as the head nurse of the grandiose hospital, a representative of the country. 

He knew the unmistakable flash of her teal-blue eyes when he saw one. Through the enigma of whirling emotions, he saw a bit of alienated virulence. Elena Balan, ironically true to her name, her light blonde, impeccably cupping the side of her smooth-featured face. 

His still muddled perception fails to percolate the lethal information into a consideration, which eventually he would be thankful for. Her detached, clinical demeanor serves as more of a relief than anything else. Too much complication after that fucking Stefania blunder. 

“ _ Mr. Lecter _ . Ugh. Cut that fucking formal crap and let’s go back to  _ Nigel _ , shall we? I don’t want to do anything with my fucking flesh and blood and our little complicated past,” Letting a deepening scowl etch across his forehead as a paroxysm sweeps over his dominant injured hand, he blames everything on his pain receptors, the emotions becoming unconquerable mountainous waves as he seems to drown in them, as he feels too much of everything at once; non-animated, yet spunky force in the tide sweeping across him with the lightning, thunder, everything between. The chill in the breeze manifesting into thin sleet across his frenetically beating heart that pressurizes to push through his parched throat.   

Nurse Petrescu barely flutters an eyelash when she registers Nigel’s bundled mess of a right hand, all the carelessness and looking more like a drenched end of a torch, scalded and soaked with flaking blood, the scent becoming more rancid along with the whiffy cologne of his strikingly memorable odor - of sweat, motor oil, gunpowder, the stale cigarette... 

After a hiss of a scrawl with a twinge of emotional pang painted across his lower face, he leaves more of his trace like a tiger would - his injured paw, leaving the scratch of a smear as he retreats to the waiting room. “Tell me you have a fucking smoking room there. All the fucking corridors and familiar repulsive scents of antiseptic and confinement of bleak walls I’ve faced with, that’s the only room I haven’t occupied myself.”  

__

Still entrapped in the vicious circle of remorse and resentment towards his twin, the concurrence of emotions that had warped his subconscious now turns into a downpour of torpidity. It swallows him whole like a quick-sinking sand, decomposing and disintegrating him into atoms. With his cold nonchalance contained in those contrasting hazel oozing menace and intensity, the ignition of the engine between his thighs resurrect the animosity.

Lashing out against Will was ineffective and far from being bountiful. Like the opposite magnetic fields, the false projection of Hannibal stays even when he’s mounted on the bike, shooting out like a columnized air pushing out a bullet. A hint of boiled anger, brimming off as he senses the other’s conspicuous gaze. Very akin to how his own transfixed ones would smolder with burning embers. Manifesting like the spewing fire from the flamethrower afterwards. 

None of the pleasurable sensations - the grazing strands of wind, the flapping of the leather, surging to become one with the surroundings as the smoothly contoured body shoots out almost effortlessly with his usual dexterity, soon turning into a blunder as his butterfingered hand fails to hold and teeter violently.  

With the wretched stream still coursing through his body now completely depleted, when he finally comes to his senses, he’s lying face-down on the coarse pavement, with increasing flow of crimson pool reflecting the sunlight within it and the onslaught of acute sear spreading over down his left side. 

The bike is nowhere his entrapped sight as his head remains cased in the cracked helmet. With half-open gaze trying to access the damage and his damned location, he pivots his hips, only to shriek out a string of pained, muffled cry as the windshield pins him more like an insect with a pin perforated through its body. 

The percussion of the heartbeat reaching up between the temple and his forehead, the looming urgency heightens along with the beating of bongo drums. Along with the cold tremor digressing all over his body like gradually intensifying electric current. His body sending signals the inescapable demise he aptly have been dodging. 

Suddenly, a ear-splitting booming explosion eggs his fleeting consciousness from some distance apart. He would later learn, apparently he wasn’t the only one who had placed himself behind the wheels with copious amount of alcohol consumption. The driver of the lorry had met an instantaneous death, while the vehicle burst into flames. Before he lets go of the tight hold of his conscious, the blaring siren of the ambulance gradually dawns over him, then it’s lights out as the flickering light sparks off as the encasing glass shatters into fragments.  

___

The smoking room was less of a  _ room _ , and more of a vaguely sheltered alcove at the side of the hospital, where patients and staff alike gathered in huddled clusters, spoke curling from their mouths.  It was drafty on the best of days, and positively frigid in the winter; but on that particular day, the sun beating down and reflecting off the grey bricks, it was almost pleasant.

At least the smell of tobacco was marginally less disturbing than the cloying antiseptic scent that seemed to permeate the inside of the hospital wards.

And it was only a few steps from the waiting room room; where rows of truly institutional, bolted down chairs were lined up in precise rows.  Grey plastic and faded, green checked tiles, all arranged in the same depressingly drab palette that interior designers liked to call ‘soothing’.

Things were almost civil while Elena was on shift; she, at least, would remind Nigel that Will was still sleeping– offering a few reserved words of pseudo-comfort.  But all that changed as the dinner chime sounded, and her shift was replaced by the night nurse.  

She was a vinegary lady, with a pinched face and a severe disposition.  An angry one, who looked at Nigel like he was some sort of deviant.  And despite being Will’s next of kin, she made it very clear that– as Nigel was neither husband, nor sibling or parent, he would just have to wait until Will woke up.

Mercifully, just as they were collecting the trays from the patient’s meals, a junior nurse (rather pretty, in a simple sort of way) came to tell Nigel that his partner was awake.

The room was dim, the lights turned down very low.  Beneath the starched, pea green blankets, Will looked very small, a starched white bandage wound around his curly head, anchoring a wad of gauze against his forehead. His foot was slung upwards, wrapped in a white plaster cast that enclosed the bones from toes to knee.  An IV pole dripped away beside him; but there were no bleeping machines or heart monitors, and Will’s eyes were only a bit glassy when Nigel entered the room.

“Hey..”  He murmured, with the slow exaggerated blink of someone who is just pulling themselves up from anesthetic, “What’s a.. guy like you.. doing in a place like this?”


	8. Chapter 8

The smoking room’s ambiance looked almost ethereal, compared to his office where it had been filled with blending whorl of haphazardly painted strokes, whereas in here, the ray of light breaking through the perforated areas gave off a whole new different vibe. Thankfully, there hadn’t been any disturbance or distracting individuals that would taint the sole experience of surrounding himself with both noxiousness and celestial beauty (however skewed that might be, with rooms full of shrieking pained cries and deathly morbidness of the sepulcher one step too close). Myriads of incomplete fragmented thoughts whizz past his enclosed bundle of emotions. This had been not the place nor the time to do so. Broodingly going through the pack (or what’s left of it), he unfixed gaze spreads over to the distance beyond, somewhere over the horizon where none of the phantasms from the night before in the club would be present. 

Leaning against the clinical, tasteless white (it wasn’t a purifying, pleasant white at all), he briefly zones out and startles awake when the light from the stub scalds through the tip of his finger. Pressing the filter enough to have the excess tobacco smear off against the fingerprint, he shoves it against the wall and watches the scattering ash fall down beneath his feet. Toes crammed into the little space his oxfords can offer. 

He must have gone through half a pack before slipping into something between teetering edge of consciousness and oblivion as a greedy finger searches for another one. He wasn’t a heavy smoker per say, but such occurrences like this when he had been beyond depleted and had been running on fumes of lingering kick of the suppressant and stimulant still helix through the dilated veins, made him to appear like one. Bloodshot eyes appear behind the dense unventilated mounds of fog, as he retreats back to scattered dumps of what people would call a ‘waiting area,’ and slips into a wave of unconsciousness for unforeseen amount of time. 

The night nurse had been as pleasant as the one he had come faced before when he had been hospitalized before, going through a dialysis to clear all the crap that had made his body shut off like a short-circuited electrical wire. He must have been looking like crap, with the coagulated blood drawing ugly sets of pattern across bundled heap of bandages and creaking joints, that of a senile old hag. 

With an unceremonious pull from the chair, his skin having plastered against the back rest of the chair with sprawled position which imprinted the unforgiving curves of the plastic chairs onto his skin, he shoots an askance, laser-like glower reminiscent of a sharpshooter’s gun about to switch off an individual’s life as it had been already predestined. Will Graham’s name on the washed-out plastic greets him rather ominously, he feels his own should be etched beneath the other’s for a portent souvenir. 

Dragging himself into the dimmed room as if a puppeteer had been controlling his uncooperative appendages, he hauls his form across the threshold. Even through the vicissitudes of their relationship, the stark irony of their disposition, the outcome put an eternal marring into the crease of his heart. 

“Consider this place my fucking second home. They should have a fucking VIP nametag etched with none other than my name on it,” he blinks and perches (or rather, more so sinks and slides) onto the edge of the bed, holding Will’s hand, embellished with a slapped-on bandage over the bevelled edge of the IV lines. 

With a rake of his dry, matted hair and gauging the beard growth (more than a few days, off top of his head) along with how impoverished his skin had gotten, his thumb rubs over one particularly prominent vein along Will’s wrist. “Is this how you retaliate, by not getting home in  _ one fucking whole piece _ ?”   

___

“It’s not a retaliation.. It’s a moron that ran through a red light at the intersection, and right into me.  Believe me.. This is the last place I want to be.”

Through the hazy cocktail of painkillers dripping slowly and steadily through the IV line, Will was vaguely aware that his whole body hurt.  Beneath the blankets he could feel the taut weight of bandages circling his chest ( _ that would be broken ribs _ , he filled in for himself), and his toes, peeking from the end of the cast, were uncomfortably cold.

As Nigel crossed the room, he took a quick mental stock; the only benefit to having everything hurt, he decided, was that he could be sure that it was all still attached.

He wasn’t sure what time it was.  Or how long Nigel had been sitting in the waiting room.  In the dim abyss of the windowless room, it could have been minutes.  It could have been years.  There was simply no point of reference.

As Nigel sat down on the side of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight, Will felt the last fortifying threads of his earlier anger melting away.  Plastic surgical tubing trailed from his other hand as he reached over, folding Nigel’s worn, rough hands between his cold ones.

His eyes were glassy in the dark, as he looked up at Nigel for a long moment.  Morphine and anesthesia were as good as exhaustion for loosening his tongue; and with a sandpapery swallow, Will gave Nigel’s hand a slow squeeze.

“I wanted to be angry at you.. Last night… Was easier than admitting that.. I’m scared to lose you.  You collect the worst shirts I’ve ever seen.. You’re allergic to tidying up.. And you could probably light the kitchen on fire while boiling water.’

“But there’s only one place in the world that really feels like home.  And that’s because you’re there.  And.. I don’t tell you, I know, I never do.. But I love you…  And I hated every second of fighting with you.”

___

If that collision hadn’t instantaneously killed the driver, he would’ve gone to the ends of the earth to track down that particularly inconsiderate motherfucker and sought to end his life personally. Nevertheless, there’s a silver lining that the man had been done for and Will remained to be in one piece, albeit what seems to be an endless loop of bandages entrapping him in space. “And I’m glad that moron is dead, one way or another.” He concludes, eyes pinched and lips straightened in a grim line. 

His whole body had been drawn taut ever since he had stepped into the waiting room and the little shuteye had done little to none to relieve the exacerbation; of guilt, the fact that he had been unreasonably obstinate and unmoving. Resolute as ever when it came to his self-destructive lifestyle. The last stubborn strand of drug, which had completely taken over his subconsciousness melts away from behind his eyeballs, the dull heaviness driving his burdensome weight of the eyelids to drop the curtain, refusing to open back up again. 

He was remotely glad there weren’t any windows. Judging by how exhausted he had felt and his biological rhythm had never failed him. Sun had already risen, the daybreak well past over and there would be no blinding wash of basking glow that would turn pins and needles against his worn out frame. He feels shriveled inside, while his carapace holds him, along with what seems to be his impassive mask - the usual fortification of his defense mechanism when inadequacy had been only his drawn conclusion.  

Idly smoothing a hand over the rail on the electric bed, he watches a faint pink smear tinge the glistening chrome silver. Scooting a bit away from Will’s side, he retracts his hand, all the calloused joints curling inward like a wounded falcon with a broken wing. Probably more like a predatory avian caught in a barbed wire, cumulatively, as much as he strives to be liberated from the entrapment, the contraption closes in, all the sharpened blade pointed at him with not even an inch to move around. 

“What a quintessential domestic man,” he makes a belittling remark and begins to unfurl the clumped bandages, blood and sweat, now a scalding tear pushes and brims against diaphanous orbs. Reddened etched gaze shoots pins and needles as searing pain intensifies. A missed shard slicing through the back of his veined hand. 

“I was scared for the first fucking time ever in my life last night. No fucking doubt I believed you were gone from my grasp,” he hisses, a trail of blood conjoining the dried flecks of crimson, scattering downward like a tapped ash from the cigarette. “No matter what happened between us, I should’ve gone home in your arms.” With outstretched thumb, he feels the faint pulsation beneath the fingerprint, as well as his hitching heartbeat. 

___

Will could feel the incessant tug of the sedatives running through his veins, pulling him down.  Paired with the foggy, numbing touch of the morphine, drying his mouth and making his words sound thick and rough as he pushed them across his lips.

It felt like he was drowning; reaching with clawed, desperate fingers for syllables that flitted through his mind, and then vanished just as quickly.  Somewhere in those elusive words, he knew, there was the  _ right _ ones.  The ones that could explain how wrong he had been.  

That he never should have left the club that night.  That he should have walked over, sat down, and damn well made it clear to the half dressed, slinking blonde that Nigel was  _ his _ .  

That he was sorry.  More than anything else, how sorry he was.

“Not gone..”  Will said slowly, his tongue sticking dryly to the back of his teeth.  His arms felt like lead weights had been threaded into the seams of his hospital gown, the papery material rustling unpleasantly as he tried to move.  “Don’t be scared.. M’ not leaving.. If you forgive me?”

Gingerly, Will tried to shift sideways; his body protesting every inch, and bringing a hiss out between his teeth as his broken ribs twinged hard through the morphine.  Nigel looked like the weight of the world had settled squarely on his shoulders; both of them hurting and exhausted and  _ God  _ this fucking hospital bed was uncomfortable, but it would have to do.

“I shouldn’t have left you, either.”  Black spots floated in his line of sight as he finally made enough room for Nigel, beside him on the bed.  The thin blankets dragged aside, as invitingly as a hospital cot could look.  

The nurses would hate it.  

Will didn’t particularly care.

“But.. We can fix that now.”


End file.
